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Editorial

A MESSAGE FROM GIANCARLO PERINI, PUBLISHER.

Car designers around the world, please help us to raise this baby. Make it yours.

Yes, you can!

Through the past five years I have been running a blog dedicated to car design with an experimental approach. I was eager to establish a bridge with the design community and to gain experience on the web.

Now, time has come for a new project with broader goals, focuses and reach.

The goal is to establish a very lively «Café littéraire» where professional designers, design educators and students, car and design enthusiasts meet, show their ideas, discuss design matters and trends, contribute with their own reports and stories to the development of a modern design culture, with past experiences and inputs from different cultures.

Yesterday

GREAT DESIGN - THE LANCIA STRATOS STORY

The Great Stratos event at the Museo dell’Automobile di Torino. April 4th 2018.

Some forty years ago (indeed almost 50) It took a lot of guts and will to turn into reality the dream rally car only few dared to imagine, conceive, design, create and race to eventually achieve unprecedented world championships title in a row. Many of those who made this possible were all there when Enrico Borgogno and Thomas Popper presented their “Stratos” encyclopedia.

It was amazing to see and feel how many tons of passion, emotion, memories filled the auditorium It has been a moment to remember and I decided I would try to get a memorandum through the autographs of those I have met.

The story goes something like this. A maharaja from Eastern India was visiting London sometime in the 1930s, and the man being a follower and admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, believed in dressing simply: just the long white kurta and a plain white dhoti. Though he was not one bit ostentatious in his outward appearance, he still had the taste of his forbears, a penchant for things expensive. And so, like many of his kind, he decided to pay a visit to one of the London showrooms of Rolls-Royce, a marque whose cars he traditionally patronized.

De Tomaso Mangusta, designed by Giugiaro, built by Ghia.The announcement and the fine pictures released by Historics of Brooklans auction house in Surrey, has just provided us with the chance to offer you are small portfolio of the stunning De Tomaso Mangusta.Giugiaro designed the Mangusta for De Tomaso in 1966, shortly after his departure from Bertone, where he had left ideas that led Marcello Gandini and his mentor Nuccio Bertone to the design of the mythical Lamborghini Miura. Giugiaro was aware he had to mark the change from Bertone to Ghia and penned a revolution moving from the new mid-engine chassis proposed by De Tomaso. His most dramatic innovation in the styling of the new supercar was the uninterrupted section lines of the bodywork on all planes as well as the extremely reduced height of the car and raked windscreen.

Stile Bertone is now up for sale. In block or parts. It is hoped that soon the company established by the father of Nuccio Bertone 102 years ago return to life and creativity under a professional management.

The sorrow is so great that mane friends, which whom we produced a story for the unpublished e-magazine Kinetika, have asked me to publish that homage written by the excellent Enrico L. Fagone, on the occasion of the centennial of the oldest Italian coachbuilder still in existence.

This report of mine was first published on October 1st, 2013 in autodesign.socialblog.us

Four days later Stile Bertone issued a press-realease, reproduced below.

BERTONE ROUMOURED SALE TO TURKISH GROUP IS NO GO.

Staff and managers of the galaxy of most of the small companies operating under the Bertone name or controlled by the Bertone confused and confusing net of holdings will all be all on temporary lay-off as of the November 1st, according to unofficial workers unions sources.